Series:

Geert Lernout

Abstract

From the moment when he first read Ulysses as an undergraduate, Vladimir Nabokov thought of Joyce as a major presence in his literary aesthetics and as one of his four top twentieth-century authors (with Proust, Kafka and Bely). The Irish and the Russian author had a lot in common, not just as exiles, but also as writers in a Flaubertian vein. And within months of his arrival in the United States, Nabokov had befriended the two pioneering Joycean critics, Harry Levin and Edmund Wilson.

Nabokov’s lectures on Joyce at Cornell were special, because he was teaching Ulysses before Joyce’s letters had been published, and before the publication of Richard Ellmann’s famous biography. In addition, Nabokov deliberately placed his form of literary interpretation outside the New Critical, psychoanalytical and mythological approaches of the university critics of his time, preferring literary detail over grand ideas. And that is not a bad strategy for reading Joyce.

Geert Lernout

Chapter

Edited by Wim van Mierlo

Series:

Geert Lernout

Abstract

Philology is a historical discipline and as such, it cannot fail to be interested in its own origins. From its earliest forms in Hellenistic Alexandria, philology has attempted to understand and preserve older texts. With the development of a Christian book-body of texts in Greek and later also in Latin, this discipline only became relevant again in the Renaissance, when numerous new texts were rediscovered. In the next few centuries the new culture of the Republic of Letters led to a flowering of classical philology, which stressed the common European culture. Romantic scholars applied the new methodologies to vernacular texts and this in its turn led to ‘national’ philologies which began to lead their own lives.